by Phil Rickman
‘I’m a stranger,’ Moira said. ‘I don’t know any of it.’
Sam Hall looked hard at her in the dimness. Moira folded her arms in her wrap.
‘We have a complex situation,’ Sam said. ‘The small industries which once built up Underhowle into a community with three, four pubs, a bunch of shops and its own school went to the wall long ago. By the mid-nineties, the shops had all gone out of business, the school was threatened with closure, and the village wasn’t pretty enough to attract the cottage-hunters from London – specially with these damn pylons like watchtowers around Belsen and Auschwitz.’
It was almost night now and growing cold. Somewhere at the back of his mind Lol could hear Prof Levin saying, The one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies.
Biggest disease in Underhowle, when I came back from the States, was apathy,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I didn’t mind. I just wanted a place I could afford and where I’d be left alone to be a crank and a pain-in-the-ass idealist, sustain my fantasy that we could live without the goddam mains services run by fat cats who’d watch us die one by one, to stave off wasting-disease of the wallet.’
Lol wondered if Sam saw himself as the new Reverend Price, who’d chosen to live and fight in the plague hot spot.
‘At first, I was as pleased as anyone,’ Sam said, ‘when, like the recipient of a touch of magic, Underhowle began to undergo a small revival.’
Two things happened, almost simultaneously, he told them. Two new elements of growth that fed one another, two men with compatible dreams. Fergus Young, a teacher with real vision, took over a dying primary school, down to fourteen pupils. And Chris Cody, this computer whizz, brought in enough employees with young families to fill it up again.
‘I like Fergus. He’s evangelical, like me. Gave up a lot for that school – even his marriage, in the end. Hell, I even like Chris. Fergus knows how to inspire kids, he was getting incredible results very quickly, but I guess it was the computer input that revolutionized everything.’
‘They provided computers for the school?’ Lol recalled the Efflapure owner, Mike Sandford, telling him about the children’s computers they were manufacturing – for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two… younger.
‘They donated computers,’ Sam Hall said. ‘Not only to the school, but to every household in the catchment area with a small kid. Time the kid reaches school, it’s computer-literate, with all the educational benefits that brings. Plus most of them could read and write by age five or earlier. So between them, at this run-down school in a run-down village, Fergus and Chris have already created a generation of very smart kids.’
Lol recalled Mike Sandford again: Might look run-down, but this place is the future.
‘This been publicized?’ Moira wondered.
‘In all the right journals. Result: Cody’s kiddie computers are starting to sell, internationally – so yet more jobs. Parents squeezing themselves into the catchment area to get their kids into Fergus’s school. Property prices rising. Place still isn’t pretty, but it’s changing fast – two shops reopened in the past year, one by Cody, as a retail software outlet, but the other sells food. And we have a hairdresser, we have the refurbishment of the village hall as a sophisticated community centre. And – you know – so far, so good. We were all getting along together fine on the Underhowle Development Committee. Till we fell out.’
Sam said that although he’d been less enthused than some by the idea of Underhowle becoming a blueprint for rural regrowth, he’d kept quiet about the aspects that worried him. Until the demands for better communications began bringing results. Until the growing complaints about the poor mobile- phone signals in the valley and the bad quality of TV reception began to have enough relevance for the fat cats who ran the networks to act on them.
When the Development Committee had voted to express its approval of a plan for a new and powerful mobile-phone transmitter on the side of Howle Hill, along with a TV booster less than half a mile away, Sam had quit the committee in an atmosphere of serious acrimony. Now the booster was up and shooting signals at Underhowle, the new phone mast only awaiting the green light from the council. And no groundswell of opposition to get in the way. Only Sam, the crank, the fruitcake.
‘I expected support from the newcomers, but hell, with the village taking off the way it is, they’re scared to be seen as blocking progress. In most cases, their jobs depend on it. But it’s… with the number of goddam power lines we already got intersecting here, it’s my absolutely unswerving belief we’re in for one hell of a hot spot. Health problems – and mental health problems – on a scale you can’t imagine. Signs are there. I can give you a long list of people who died prematurely – people living too close to 140,000 volts. When that damn mast goes up, it’s gonna be electric soup. But… I got no proof and no back-up.’
Lol was thinking Sam was going to need more than a rally and protest song to raise any. He didn’t know what to say.
Sam said, ‘Sure, I have friends outside – links with Green organizations. But Green activists, they tend to be gentle people. They don’t have maybe the blind rage needed to tackle what is one enormous ecological problem and – I would venture to suggest, Reverend – a spiritual one.’
Moira said, ‘Huh?’
‘I can explain this aspect, if you’ll give me some time. If we can meet this week, perhaps, I can explain it in detail. But, essentially, our local minister, Reverend Banks, is a man with – and, as someone who’s at least half a Christian, I make no apology for this – a man with a small, closed mind, who refuses to absorb or even to consider—’
‘Mr Hall, I wouldnae doubt that he is, but if I could—’
‘I realize your position’s bound to be sensitive, where another clergyperson’s concerned. But there are some things I need to get aligned in my own mind, and I could use some advice from someone… such as yourself.’
He stood at the foot of the Plague Cross, shoulders slumped, sagging a little, looking more like his age. He unshouldered his knapsack, as if it had suddenly become too much of a burden, and laid it on the bottom step.
‘Sam,’ Lol said gently, ‘I think…’
Lol drove around the island and back onto the A40, from which the town of Ross glittered in the early night, like a birthday cake, across three lanes of traffic and the river. He drew a fold of paper from his jacket pocket.
‘Gave me this just as we were walking back into town. I guess it’s the poem. The song. He took it out of his bag almost like an afterthought, just before we went our separate ways.’ He handed the paper across to Moira. ‘Sorry, the interior light doesn’t work, but there’s a torch in the glove compartment.’
‘I suppose I ought to feel flattered,’ Moira said. ‘This could be the first time in ma whole life I was ever mistaken for a good and devout person.’
There was only one way this misunderstanding could have come about: Sam had talked to Frannie Bliss, and Bliss had disclosed Lol’s close friendship with the diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Lol had introduced Moira to Sam only by her first name. Moira – Merrily? It was an honest mistake.
‘I don’t think he’s crazy,’ Lol said. ‘But he certainly seems less stable than he did the other night. Or maybe it’s me who’s more stable than I was then.’
‘Well…’ He heard the snap of the torch switch. ‘I don’t think he’s crazy either, but he sure is no poet.’
‘Not good?’
‘It’s like he just scribbled it down, off the top of his head, before he came out.’
‘Maybe he did.’
‘Aye.’
In the darkness of the car, Lol was aware of Moira’s scent; it made him think of deserted sand dunes in the Hebrides. Or maybe that wasn’t the scent at all. Her voice came back, low.
‘He doesnae want you at all, Laurence. Or your talents. It was a wee ploy and not a very convincing one. He wants your friend. He wants an exorcist. It’s why he asked you to bring your lady.�
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‘Yes.’
‘If you’d been alone, I guess he’d’ve sounded you out about an introduction. When he thought I was her, he went for it: “an ecological problem, but also a spiritual one”. But when he found out I wasnae exactly ordained, the spiritual part stayed under his woolly hat. I guess he’ll find your wee reverend some other way.’
Lol said, ‘What if he’s a little crazy?’
‘Ach, Laurence, we’re all of us a little crazy.’
‘And the Plague Cross?’
‘Well… there’s a sickness there, all right,’ Moira said.
Still?’
She was quiet for a moment. ‘He’s scared of something, and he’s no’ sure exactly what.’
Lol was puzzled. ‘He is sure, isn’t he?’
‘He knows what he can see – the pylons and the TV masts and those sinister mobile-phone masts with the bits sticking out. But he cannae see electricity and he cannae see evil.’
Lol said after a while, ‘Is this a warning?’
‘Oh, Laurence,’ Moira said, ‘if it was all as simple and direct as, like, “Don’t get on any planes on the 18th”. What do I say to you here? I’m standing by the Plague Cross and this guy’s talking about people buried without coffins, and then I start thinking about you and your friend digging for dead people, and I get this rather loathsome curling sensation down in ma gut – which I believe I managed to conceal rather well. I don’t know what that means, do I?’
‘What should I say to Merrily?’
She let him drive in silence for a while.
‘Aye well,’ she said, ‘that’s a difficult one.’
That night Lol called Merrily on the mobile, from his loft.
‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘I met Sam Hall when I was in Underhowle with Frannie Bliss. He didn’t go out of his way to speak to me then. On the other hand, Bliss had introduced me as a DC. Which nobody seemed to question at the time.’
‘Maybe assuming there must have been a change in the height regulations,’ Lol said.
‘Ho ho. So am I supposed to go and see him?’
‘Why would you need to? I was just warning you he might try and get in touch. So you’d know what it was about, vaguely, if he did. And if I could just—’
Merrily said, ‘Only, I’ve been asked to bury Roddy Lodge, you see.’
‘Bury him?’
‘Not dig the hole – conduct the funeral.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a Christian tradition. But if you mean why me, it’s because a large number of people in Underhowle are saying, We don’t want this murderer in our churchyard, and the local minister’s got cold feet from sitting on the fence. And I’m like your Mr Hall. An established fruitcake.’
Lol said, ‘Do you have to do it?’
‘I don’t have to.’ A pause. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
Lol imagined her at her desk, shoes off, toes curled under the electric fire. He felt that, whatever she was getting into, she should not be left in there alone.
26
Black Sheep Kind of Thing
HE’D COME DOWN from the hill on his quad bike as soon as his wife had reached him on the mobile. ‘I can’t discuss this,’ she’d said miserably when she saw the dog collar. ‘You’ll have to speak to Mr Lodge.’ And went on talking about the rain and how much of it there was these days, until he was pulling off his wellies at the kitchen door.
Out of the plain, square kitchen windows, all Merrily could see was damp fog, greenish like mucus.
Mr Lodge: this defined him now. His father was dead, and he was the eldest brother. This was his farmhouse, brown-washed and hunched into the foggy hillside, and this was his name: Mr Lodge, the last one in the valley.
They looked at one another. By the frosted fluorescent tube on the kitchen ceiling, Merrily saw a fawn-haired man in a working farmer’s green nylon overalls, edging quietly towards sixty, lean and wary as a dog fox. He saw something that evidently worried him.
He coughed. ‘I’m sorry I, er, I didn’t expect you’d be a woman.’
Well now, wouldn’t she be running a wealthier parish, if she had a pound for every time someone had said that?
‘I’ll make some tea,’ Mrs Lodge mumbled.
‘Yes.’ He nodded at Merrily. ‘Well… thank you. Thank you for coming.’ He indicated a wooden chair with arms and a car cushion on it, near the Rayburn. ‘You have that one. In the warm.’
‘Thank you.’ She took off Jane’s duffel coat and hung it around the back of the chair. She was wearing the black jumper- and-skirt outfit and her fleece-lined boots. He looked away.
‘Tony Lodge,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Merrily Watkins. I’m… afraid I only heard about this last night. From the Bishop.’
‘Ah.’ He sat himself on a hard chair at the edge of the gatelegged table, leaving about seven feet of flagged floor between them. He sat with his cap on his knees. ‘So you en’t spoken to Mr Banks.’
‘Not about this, no. I’ll probably be seeing him later.’
‘If you’re lucky.’
She smiled, easing her chair to one side so that Mrs Lodge could put the kettle on the Rayburn, which Mrs Lodge accomplished without looking at her.
‘Not, er… not that I’m a churchgoing man any more,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘My parents were chapel, and I was raised to that. When the chapel went out of use my father, he started going to the church instead, because at least the church was still here, even if the services were few and far between. He wouldn’t go to Ross to worship. And he wouldn’t go to Ross to be buried. And that’s what this is about.’
Merrily said, ‘I gather there’s a long-standing agreement with the Church, on burials.’
‘Never been any other way, look. They reckon the chapel here was near as old as the church, and there’s only one graveyard in Underhowle – that’s up at the church, where the land’s better drained, more suitable for burial. And that’s where we goes, the Lodges.’ He paused. ‘That’s where my brother’s to go. Friday, we thought, if that’s all right for you. Funeral director’s Lomas of Coleford.’
‘Your father…’
‘Would not be happy if the sons were not around him and my mother. You understand that.’
‘Of course. Erm…’
Mr Lodge raised bony brown hands in a warding-off gesture. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘I don’t want to talk about what he’s done. My duty to my father, as eldest son, is to see my brother buried at Underhowle – not cremated. I would like there to be a proper service. If Mr Banks wants to throw in his hand with the newcomers, that’s his business.’
Merrily didn’t say anything. She might have known it would be something like this.
‘There was a deputation here last night,’ Mr Lodge said. ‘How much you know about that, I en’t sure.’
‘Deputation?’ All Sophie had told her was that the Rev. Banks had said the Lodges were not members of his congregation, whereas the family of the missing Melanie Pullman was, and therefore he would prefer it if an outside minister could handle Roddy’s funeral. It wasn’t an unusual procedure in cases like this.
‘Local people,’ Tony Lodge said, ‘and some not so local. Wanting me to have my brother cremated. Said it would be better for his ashes just to be scattered in the churchyard, that a grave would become a… “tourist attraction”. Not the sort they wanted for Underhowle. The new Underhowle.’ Bitterness tainting his tone now. ‘Not the image they wanted for the new Underhowle.’
‘I see.’
‘I doubt you do.’ Mr Lodge almost smiled. ‘I doubt you do, Reverend, but I don’t suppose that matters.’
‘I have met some of the people in the village: Mr Young, the headmaster. And… Ingrid Sollars?’
‘Mrs Sollars. Yes, I was surprised she was part of it, but there you are. They all have their own concerns. Things aren’t simple like they used to be. In the old days, you accepted responsibility for your village, in good times and bad.
And the people there, good and bad. You kept together. Now it’s all about what you looks like to outsiders.’
‘True, I suppose.’ She was mainly worried about how she’d justify this to Gomer: leading prayers for the everlasting soul of the man he believed had murdered his nephew, incinerated his depot and his machinery, taken a pickaxe to the foundations of his life. She’d tried to reach him last night: no answer.
‘You’ll be wanting some personal information about my brother,’ Tony Lodge said. ‘I’ve written out a list – date of birth, where he went to school, that sort of detail.’
‘Well, actually, what…’ What Merrily wanted most was a cigarette. ‘What I normally do is have a chat with the relatives of the person who’s died so that, at the service, I can talk about them, as people. We don’t bury bodies, we bury people. If you see what I mean.’
She wondered if he did. There were few signs in this drab, functional farmhouse of real sorrow, only of resignation: perhaps an attitude branded into farmers by BSE and foot-and- mouth and endless forms from the Ministry of Agriculture, now called DEFRA – which Jane said stood for Destroying Every Farm-Reared Animal.
‘Look…’ Mr Lodge was facing her, although she could tell his eyes weren’t focused on hers as much as on the space between them. ‘I don’t want no fuss. I don’t want things said about him that weren’t true, just for appearances. I don’t really want anything said about him at all. Just like it done quickly and with dignity. Isn’t as if there’s going to be much of an audience anyway.’
Merrily sighed. ‘I’m afraid you might find there’s rather more of one than you think. There’ll almost certainly be police and… reporters. Possibly even television – I wouldn’t like to say.’
He stood up. He said, without raising his voice, ‘He was cursed from the first, that boy.’
The kettle came to the boil behind Merrily and began to shriek, as if demanding she should leave. She stood up, too. ‘Look, if you want to have a think about it, I’ll leave you my number, or I can ring you. We’ll also have to discuss the choice of hymns, that kind of… Oh, and one other thing – Roddy. Roddy’s… body. Where do you—?’